/lit/ - Literature

RIP big guy. i really looked up to bloom when I was younger but gradually came to recognize him as the hack he was.

whenever he was going on about a writer he really liked, he would open the essay or chapter saying x was such a good a writer, his character was actually more X than the writer- like hamlet was a better poet than Shakespeare, or satan was a better political pamphleteer than Milton. Slowly the entire essay/chapter would be enveloped in this parlor trick, with some reactionary attacks on modern writers to even it all out.

Seeing this pattern across a host of his books, and recognizing how focused on surfaces he was, rarely daring to enter the essence of a work, was an important moment in my growth as a reader.